I love this: "During the height of their fame, the 3 Mustaphas 3 live concerts were a delightful mix of humor, mystery and superb, wildly grooving playing by musicians who had a deep understanding and appreciation of the music, and the cultures from which that music arose.[neutrality is disputed]" I don't know how we'll be flagging areas of dispute in the Global Knowledge Bank in twenty years, but I'm pretty confident there'll be a TV programme where the Andrew Collinses of the day reflect wistfully-but-cheerfully on the days when you could consult Wikipedia entries and check the discussion page, while bouncing on a Space Hopper the whole time.
To indulge in my own, less entertaining brand of nostalgia, let me say that, at the time I bought this record, it was not immediately clear how much of a spoof the Mustaphas were. I came across them via John Peel, of course. But even now the listings for the many Mustapha Peel sessions list the stage names of band members, rather the ones their mothers knew them by.
It was a couple of decades later, when I saw Lu Edmonds play solo, that I discovered he'd once been the avuncular Pastrel Mustapha, and it was only a couple of years ago — probably when the late Charlie Gillett had Les Triaboliques in session — that I found out that Triabolique Ben Mandelson was also known as Hijaz Mustapha.
Their playing on this record does indeed sound superb. The "100% Digital" banner on the album cover dates from an era when "digital" actually stood for high sound quality rather than crappy compression. But the tongue was frequently in cheek, as the catalogue number FEZ001 and the wacky stories that feature in some of the tracks, all told with a Carry On wink-and-a-nudge.
I more or less lost track of the Mustaphas after this, their first record, though I guess I still heard the Peel session, which carried on until 1990. Lovely to hear this again. It makes me think they could have been another Penguin Cafe Orchestra — that same combination of deep musicological knowledge, genuine empathy for other cultures, but filtered through a resolutely English eccentricity. But somehow they weren't. Maybe the fez jokes made it all seem, wrongly, a bit like the Black and White Minstrel Show.
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